risk
Wynn Yarbrough
we clean
the pieces of our heads
we reattach
after so much firing our fingers caress
our scratches
until tears bloom and grow
in the gunpowder.
scars are homes we molest
to reminisce.
we snort
the resin sucking on the grit
of battle and kiss goodbye
the countries we risk
penne alla puttanesca
Wynn Yarbrough
the hookers in milan need to keep the carbs up
when their garb goes down they want to be fueled
and filled with something more than the wine
that roars off the breath of a swelling habadasher
or bootmaker. they love the olives and capers,
chewing on the pits, always chewing on the pits
on puttanesca night, you can smell them
in the garlic evening, anchovies swimming
to their stomach in a spray of salt water. they stand
in a doorway, packed, wriggling, jumping into shadow,
hooking their arms around lamp poles, digesting through the night.
Older Woman
Wynn Yarbrough
Maybe I remind
you of your son.
Maybe when I knot
my forehead and turn,
your husband sways
between the two beams
of this four post bed,
comes dancing toward
you, seems to be
but isn’t. When you
reach out and touch
me, forgive yourself
and the smell
of someone leaving.
Let’s turn on the lights,
Let’s be ageless
and do away
with maybes.
Backstrokes
for Ben Steinmetz and your stories from the couch
Wynn Yarbrough
Descending, sunlight grows old. Whiskey uses
ice and dissolves into brown shadows.
Snow buries and tries to fill the great gaps
of love between his lovers and his nap.
Leaning back on the couch, Ben stirs and blends
Crown Royal, Seven Up and slices of women.
I. Greta
When he was a teenager, Greta lingered
by the stalls. Ben pulled off her chaps, fingered
her well-used jodhpurs, threw away his broom.
Younger horses strained through training laps, Ben groomed
Greta in the saddle room, sliding on leather
well worn and used to their galloping together.
She always posted, whipping him to the finishing line.
Ben was the stable boy: stained prince of straw and lime.
Ben reaches for the light and stares again
at the snow and the collection of faces
he’s facing. He’s a landlord in Oregon,
thinking between the hints and traces
of power in plumbing and wiring,
wondering why man, why women. He knows
he borrows bodies and is borrowed.
Less character than setting, the animals
on the cave of his brain? Always moving.
II. Cherry
Cherry loved his free, blue eyes and hairless skin.
Daughter of a famous jazz musician,
she graduated from a private school,
worked as a hostess at a hotel bar.
After hours, brown and pink skin blue in a pool.
Notes her daddy wrote and suffered gave her sovereignty in this golden
prison, enough
luxurious time, money (and clothes)
Ben took, took away, took off.
How bestial to remember women this way!
Women with money, with a royal sway,
women who relaxed a self-serving body
from stiff joints and violent grips of history.
They wrote on their caves with a delicate brush,
like his fingers, stirring a pond of whiskey
and seven-up, rubbing the past and himself.
III. Alexandra
Ben learned her sheet music with a limp,
careful hand. She played her felted valves,
rigid, hard coursing through the halves
and quarter notes, going back
to fine tuning her pieces and solos.
He wanted harmony but one voice only
hardened his untouched skin to brass.
He left polished and ready
for the old chorus of chasing ass.
The ice has melted and the fire’s out.
Ben chews on smoke, rescues women with his mouth,
Crown Royal and Seven Up. Ben is marred enough
to need some nightly medication. He’s tough.
His gathering doesn’t send him tilting the glass;
he’s diluted himself past the fierce taste of fear
of sitting alone recalling until he’s recalled
to the dark, no one listening, melting ice promises.
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